These three poems by Yasser are from the collection جولة ليلية (Dar Merit, 2009) [Night Tour]. The first of these poems, Night Tour, has been translated by Youssef Rakha here. The alketaba.com website has recently brought out an excellent review of Yasser’s work and life in a “special file” with superb contributions by friends, contemporaries and young ‘uns. Yasser recently won the Sawiris Short-Story Prize for his collection يونس في احشاء الحوت (Kotob Khan, 2011) [Jonah in the Belly of the Whale] and an excellent new collection is forthcoming from the same publisher: في الإقامة والترحال: قصص وحكايات (Kotob Khan, 2014) [Settling Down and Setting Out: Stories and Tales].
Night Tour
Before the way to school,
The sickly child first learns
The way to the doctor’s,
The chemist’s beneath the clinic
With its brown cupboards
And young salesgirl done up in fashions from two decades back
Wrapping the bottles in logo-printed paper
That she unfurls from a great spool on a metal rod
And inscribes, in clear hand, the dosing regimen:
Those distant days,
You and mother descending to buy medicine—
Why then, at night,
Did the chemist’s shift at least
Four buildings out of place …?
There’s a diner on a street corner
Its steamed up windows offering
Cheap and tasty eats;
It seems so close, there as the road bends round…
You will put off eating there, night after night,
In thrall to the dictates of all-nighters and exhaustion,
And the day you make your mind up
A single stroke of a demon hand will have raised the whole place
From the map…
In the shadow zone of your city knowledge
Behind the street where as a kid you thought the world came to an end
An old signal post and the shade of an ancient traffic cop police a junction that you cross
One dewy night en route to drowsy lights
And there: a forgotten cabaret
The acts performed upon a narrow stage
The punters packed in two rows either side.
You’re a spectator; you’re a backstage hand:
Your point of view moves back and forth between the two,
From hints at raucous lives,
Promises of delights unending,
To where wellbeing counts less than a regret
As light as beer foam.
***
Rock and Roll
Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel
A rough blues fit for highways
Fine, too, for my room with its gloomy books and dust
Where beneath its wild rhythms
The cries of her desire might disappear.
Push PLAY
The music surges out
A train’s roar as it moves from tunnel to
Chasm
Unseen as yet but coming up, for sure…
… From Los Angeles, California… The Doors!…
I loved her
And she loved my friend;
He turned her down,
She came to me.
We need half a litre of tequila
Drunk down without salt or lime,
We need rats to gnaw our limbs
We need to vanish.
With her on top of me, like debts inherited,
I take her
Quick
A fleeting pulse of love,
Leave her to mop up our glorious failure
With a sock lying on the bed.
The bedroom door don’t shut
I don’t love her no more
And the tape deck, Made In China it may be,
Does the job.
Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel
Morrison was fully complicit in our crime
And then there were plates, smeared with ketchup.
The sock soared out to the room’s far end
While outside, Dad
Calmly ate his lunch
That hot afternoon
In Summer 1997.
***
Romance
Tiny statuettes,
Palm-sized,
Cut-glass and gleaming marble,
Tumble from a high balcony
Onto the garden’s tiles.
The queen walks alone through the garden
Barefoot on the damp grass
Dressed in white down to the knees
And the moon turns the garden’s night to silvered day.
A black cat mewing like a siren,
Captive in the courtyard of a high tower
With walls as smooth as Fate.
Shall the mewl serve
To pick a hole in the walls of despair?
I dream of the cat as I try to pick a hole
In the walls of my sleep
To cross through to the other side…
